Major General Shevendra Silva has been appointed as Sri Lanka’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) in New York and will take up his new post soon, sources at the External Affairs Ministry told Daily Mirror online this evening.

Major General Silva’s appointment to the UN comes amidst human rights allegations being raised against the government and the military which resulted in UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon appointing a panel to advise him on Sri Lanka.

Foreign Ministry sources said that after taking over from former Deputy Permanent Representative Bandula Jayasekera, Major General Silva is expected to “clear the air” over the concerns being raised at the UN regarding Sri Lanka and the final stages of the war against the LTTE which ended last year.

Major General Shavendra Silva was allegedly among those mentioned by MP Sarath Fonseka in a media interview where he had said that the former 58 Division Commander had received orders to shoot at sight LTTE suspects who came with white flags to surrender to the army during the final stage of war. Fonseka was later indicted in Court over his claims.

During the war as the 58 Division Commander, Major General Shavendra Silva was instrumental in the military capturing several former LTTE strongholds including the Mannar rice Bowl, Nachchikuda, Devils Point, Pooneryn, Kilinochchi, Elephant Pass, Vishvamadu and Puthukudirippu.

Doctors in Sri Lanka have found 23 nails in the body of a tortured housemaid who returned to Colombo from Riyadh, Sri Lankan Embassy sources told Arab News on Tuesday.

“We have received this complaint from the Foreign Ministry in Colombo, who said the maid has been allegedly tortured by her sponsor,” a senior diplomat from the Sri Lankan mission in Riyadh told Arab News. “We are looking for the sponsor. We were able to track down the Saudi recruitment agent in Riyadh and we will summon the sponsor to discuss this issue,” the official said.Doctors at the Kamburipitya Base Hospital in the Matara district, 140 km from Colombo, said the nails had been hammered into the maid’s body. Dr. Kamal Weeratunge, who was treating the maid, claimed the nails had been heated up before they punctured her skin.

On Sri Lankan television channel Newsfirst Sirasa, the maid showed the marks where the nails had gone through. The maid, identified as 50-year-old Ariyawathie, said that there were too many people to serve in the house where she worked.

“I had to work continuously since I had to do the chores of all the occupants and when I wanted to take rest due to tiredness, they inserted the nail in my body as a punishment,” she said.

“I had to work from dawn to dusk. I hardly slept. They beat me and threatened to kill me and hide my body.” She added that she arranged her travel documents to return home on her own expense. “They were really devils with no mercy at all,” she said.

According to records at the Sri Lankan Embassy, the maid came to the Kingdom on March 25. The diplomat said that the sponsor had bypassed the mission and made his own arrangements to send the woman home. “We can only deal with cases that come up before the mission,” he said. However, he added that the mission would take action following the complaint submitted to the embassy from Colombo.

The maid had come to Saudi Arabia after being registered at the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE).

SLBFE chairman Kingsley Ranawake said that a formal inquiry would be held with the concerned maid and appropriate action taken.

ATamil diaspora visitor who recently went to see the archaeological site at Kantharoadai in the heart of Jaffna peninsula found all signboards in the site in Sinhalicized Sinhala. Further, he was asked to remove shoes to walk the site, indicating that this important heritage site of the people of Jaffna is fast becoming a cult centre of contemporary Sinhala-Budhhism to culturally and psychologically alienate the people of Jaffna from their land. Ancient remains of Buddhism in Tamil land are not a cultural property of today’s genocidal Sinhala-Buddhism. What is happening in Jaffna is perhaps the ‘reconciliation’, meant by the ‘culture and development’ pundits, commented an academic in Jaffna.

The Tamil name of the archaeological site is Kantharoadai, meaning the pond of Kanthar.

But the signboards presently displayed in the archaeological site give a Sinhala name Kadurugoda for the site. The description boards in the site are entirely in Sinhala. Besides, the Archaeology Department has also translated the name Chu'n'naakam of the nearby town, from Tamil into Sinhala Hu’nugama, even though the latter was never in usage.

First of all Kadurugoda is a translation of the Tamil name Kathiramalai. In a late historiographical literature of Jaffna, Kathiramalai is mentioned as a seat of an ancient kingdom that existed in the Jaffna Peninsula prior to the medieval Kingdom of Jaffna.

In the early 20th century when the archaeological site at Kantharoadai was brought to light by Paul E Pieris, (grandfather of archaeologist Siran Deraniyagala), it was assumed that Kathiramalai mentioned in the literature should be Kantharoadai. The name Kathiramalai for a locality a couple of kilometres away from the site was cited in evidence. Kadurugoda was then invented either as a translation of Kathiramalai or to rhyme with Kantharoadai.

Kathiram in Tamil, and Khadira in Sinhala stand for the spiky acacia shrub. The plant got the name because of its prominent spikes or thorns. The Tamil word Kathir means spike (Dravidian Etymological Dictionary 1194, 1195). This word has Kannada and Telugu cognates spelt as Kaduru.

Even though Kaduru in Sinhala is a generic name for some species of trees bearing poisonous nuts, what suits the natural vegetation of the locality is acacia.

Koadu (a synonym of Malai) in Tamil / Malayalam means hill, hillock, peak, summit of a hill etc., as well as bank of a stream or pond (Dravidian Etymological Dictionary 2049, 2200). Goda in Sinhala means heap, mass, mound etc as well as land at a water’s edge. Both the Tamil / Malayalam koadu and the Sinhala goda are popular place name suffixes. Thousands of place names in the Sinhala heartland of the island end with goda and in this sense the word also stands for a village or hamlet.

Obviously, even after rendering Kathiramalai into Sinhala as Kadurugoda, there is nothing non-Dravidian in it.

But we have some Sinhala academics not knowing their Sinhala, telling that Eezham Tamils are ‘language-replaced’ Sinhalese. They cite the Eezham Tamil place names as examples. Given the nature of the admixture of Dravidian and Prakrit in the island in evolving Eezham Tamil and Sinhala languages, the Tamils can also say that the Sinhalese are ‘language-replaced’ Tamils.

Amusingly, the same academics also imagine the presence of Sinhala-Buddhism wherever they find a Bo tree in the Tamil land.

The cluster of Buddhist stupas found at Kantaroadai is a heritage of the people of Jaffna. Buddhism was not the beginning of heritage in Jaffna. Below the Buddhist layer of Kantharoadai, evidences for an earlier culture called the megalithic culture of South India was noticed by Pennsylvania University archaeologists in the 1960s.

According to Pali chronicles, when the first Buddhist emissaries in the 3rd century BCE came to the island through Jaffna peninsula, the name of the port in its Pali rendering was Ko’la Patuna (Kozhu-paddinam, meaning the port at the point). The name clearly indicates that it was a Tamil port town, as both Kozhu and Paddinam are Tamil / Dravidian terms (DED 2147, 3868).

The Tamil Buddhist epic Ma’nimeakalai testifies to Buddhism prevailing among Tamils in the island in the early centuries of the Common Era. It was a cultural choice of Eezham Tamils that they relinquished Buddhism later. But the archaeological remains are their heritage.

This heritage doesn’t give licence to today’s Sinhala-Buddhists to alienate Tamils from their land or to justify cultural genocide.

Sinhala academics reacting to what Jeremy Page wrote on Army and Archaeology phenomenon in the island miss the point or intentionally ignore it.

The cultural and psychological assault that is taking place in the Tamil land may be unimportant to the development conquistadors, but these were some of the very fundamentals that brought in the conflict in the island and they are unleashed more than ever today. The chronic situation will aggravate without territorial power status quo of the ancient nations in the island.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Bottom Line.............................................................................................................................................................................................

The Embassy of Sri Lanka in the United States on Friday brought in 25 well known American media personalities into Sri Lanka on a 9-day visit, a measure which it said could give immense publicity to the island- consequently, a boost for the booming Tourism industry. The set of tourists includes famous film producer, William Bowling (who is a key figure in deciding locations for film shoots) and other popular travel writers on various internet blogs and magazines including Margie Goldsmith, who writes to the website mgproductions.com.

“It is our pleasure to bring this group of American travellers to Sri Lanka, and I look forward to introducing these travellers to our island of unrivalled splendour and our welcoming culture. I know our journey will be an eye-opening experience that will highlight Sri Lanka’s boundless potential,” said Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to the United States, Jaliya Wickramasuriya, who personally accompanied the guests on tour.

The visit is part of a partnership between the Embassy and Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority, which had launched a programme called ‘Signature Tours’, to promote Sri Lanka as a destination.

“The Embassy plans to arrange Signature Tours on an annual basis,” Wickramasuriya said. The itinerary of this inaugural venture is organised by ‘Sri Lanka Tailor Made’, an arm of leading travel company, Jetwing Travels Private Ltd.

“The 12-day itinerary includes travel from Colombo to the UN World Heritage Site located in the Galle Fort, followed by visits to the renowned countryside and Tea fields of Nuwara Eliya,” Manager- Jetwing’s Sri Lanka Tailor Made, Sriyantha Sampath told The Bottom Line.

Earlier this year, the New York Times named Sri Lanka its number one Travel Destination in 2010, while The National Geographic ranked the island second among its top 25 places to visit this year.

In Colombo, the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) records evidence from witnesses at the sprawling, white-washed 'Lighthouse' bungalow, a colonial era mansion used by the British. When I walked in last week to hear defence secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa depose before the panel, the air was relaxed, almost informal and security checks cursory.

Welcoming enough, I thought, for someone to saunter in and tell the LLRC without fear or favour why the ceasefire agreement (CFA) with the LTTE failed and the war continued for several bleeding months.

After deposing, Rajapaksa shook the grateful hands of the panelists, mostly former bureaucrats and legal experts, and chatted with them animatedly about the hostage rescue mission to free Tamil civilians. He denied that the government was building permanent military bases on civilian property in the north.

To me, it seemed that the formally attired, and mostly smiling, LLRC was more than half-way to "ascertain, circumstances that led to the failure of the CFA of 2002 and the sequence of events that followed thereafter till May 19, 2009" and make far-reaching recommendations.

But sadly not everybody was convinced. "The CFA had no logical connection with the war and its causes; the conflict began long before the war did. The LLRC is an effort to counter-maneuver the UN panel (set up to look into rights violations during the end of the war)," said a researcher requesting anonymity.

"Blame the international community and United National Party for the CFA and the LTTE for its breakdown. That's what the LLRC will point out," said another.

I was then prodded to take a look at a 2009 Amnesty International report titled Twenty Years of Make-Believe: Sri Lanka's Commissions of Inquiry.

Which among other criticisms, quoted the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons – appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa and headed by Justice PN Bhagwati – as having concluded that a 2006 Presidential Commission of Inquiry to look into 16 key cases of human rights violations was not meeting international standard.

There were "serious conflicts of interest…that compromised the independence of the Commission and, lack of effective victim and witness protection."

Interesting, but that was of course a different commission. And as for protection, I'm sure star witness Rajapaksa's testimony to the LLRC was without a trace of fear.

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